Megaupload and what it means..

Well its probably about time i got round to writing a post on possibly the most important legislative event for techies this year. The shut down of Megaupload.com and its subsidiaries has been the cumlination for months of campaigning on both sides of the fence. It has sent ripples right through the internet ether and is continuing to keep SOPA and PIPA in the news.

Now i will state here that i believe in the rights of copyright holders to protect their work and i think that those who create such amazing content everyday of their lives and who work the arses off in the name of their art certainly deserve to reap the rewards of producing that material. In that sense even i am on the side of SOPA/PIPA. However while the basis of those acts are sturdy and true the way in which they are looking to be enacted and the scope of damage to free speech which could be inflicted from the forms of these acts is something that i cannot and will not support. Its very much like trying to stamp out a plague by killing the infected hosts rather than by giving them the necessary anti-biotics.

We need better communication between these websites and the major labels in the entertainment industry. Why were these links not taken off these webstites?? probably i suspect because nobody had asked them to be removed. Megaupload is not going to be able to check every upload to see if it the latest Britney Spears track but it should be very easy for someone within her record label to seach for her song on google and to ask sites like megaupload and google to remove infringing links. The scale of information transfer over the internet these days makes it impossible for a site like megaupload to check all of its traffic for infringements but it is much more manageable for one label to check for its individual products.

This is ofcourse an ongoing and evolving situation, and deffinately one which will not see any true end. Views on things like internet freedom come and goes depending mostly on current situations. I for instance can see a big change towards government run internet protection in maybe a decades time when state sponsored cyber-warfare is more commonplace. More recently there have been many calls for the government to crack down on groups such as anonymous, surely such a crackdown would recquire the sacrifice of certain online liberties similar to those we all gave up in the aftermath of 9/11. Although there are still those who complain the vast majority (mainly those who like myself have grown up with and am used to) accept the neccessary screening and security procedures at airports. If the Us had tried to bring in the patriot act in 2000 there would have been global outcry similar to that against SOPA/PIPA today.

The question for me then is not WHEN will these acts (or similar legistalature) go through but rather WHY will we allow it?